Drawing Blood

by Poppy Brite

He might not be able to help them, but at least he could feed them well.

  Zach stared at the huge green lump of food on his plate. Trevor was eating automatically, his fork rising and falling, his green lump quickly disappearing, washed down with cup after cup of black coffee. He had grown up in an orphanage; he could probably eat most anything put in front of him.

  But Zach just couldn’t get started. Though he was usually disposed to like things that began with Z, he thought zucchini might be his least favorite vegetable. It was soggy and nearly tasteless, with only a faint unpleasant flavor like chlorophyll tinged with sweat. If dirty socks grew on a vine, Zach thought, they would taste like zucchini.

  The casserole or whatever it was Kinsey had tried to make reminded him of the food in the comic Calvin and Hobbes that would jump off the plate and hop across the table or down the kid’s shirt making noises like blurp and argh. But Zach was too polite to pull a Calvin face. Instead he poured himself another glass of wine and wished he were back in the shower with Trevor’s hands reaching around to soap his back, with his open mouth sliding across Trevor’s wet slippery chest.

  “Can I get you something else?” Kinsey asked him.

  “No, thanks. I guess I’m just not very hungry.” In truth, Zach felt slightly nauseated after staring at the green lump for so long, but the wine seemed to be settling his stomach. He caught an odd look from Trevor and remembered that asking Kinsey to feed them had been his own idea. It was a mistake he wouldn’t make again.

  “You must eat out a lot in New York,” said Kinsey, and Trevor shot him another look: New York?

  “I try to live cheap,” he told Kinsey.

  “I thought that was impossible in New York.”

  “Rent control,” said Zach helplessly, with no real idea whether they had such a thing in New York City. Trevor stared hard at him.

  I’ll explain later, he thought, trying to telegraph it into Trevor’s head, and poured himself more wine.

  No sooner had they bid Kinsey good night and walked across the overgrown yard to the car than Trevor said, “New York, huh?”

  Zach’s head was spinning from the wine and the joint they had smoked after dinner. He leaned against the Mustang’s fender. “I’ll tell you about it when we get home.”

  “Tell me now. I don’t like being lied to.”

  “I didn’t lie to you. I lied to Kinsey.”

  “I don’t like lies at all, Zach. If that’s really your name.”

  “What? Did I just hear that from the lips of the famous Trevor Black?” Trevor looked away. “Look, I told you I was on the run! I can’t just go around telling everyone the truth! Now get in the car.”

  “Can you drive?”

  “Of course I can fucking drive.” Zach pushed himself off the fender and lost his balance, almost fell headlong into the grass. Trevor caught him and he leaned into Trevor’s arms, slipped his arms around Trevor’s waist. “Don’t be mad,” he whispered.

  “Are you okay?” Trevor asked.

  Zach hadn’t eaten anything all day, and he had drunk most of the big bottle of wine. He imagined it sloshing around in his stomach, mingling with all the come he’d swallowed, sweet ruby red swirled with salty pearly white. Zach thought again of the green lump of lasagna and almost lost it, but he couldn’t stand for Trevor to see him puke.

  “I’m fine,” he said. Muffled against the front of Trevor’s shirt it came out as one slurry word. “I just got a little drunk. It’s nothing.” He felt Trevor’s body stiffen, remembered that Bobby had been drunk on whiskey when he killed the family. To Trevor, the words I’m drunk, it’s nothing must sound both stupid and cruel.

  Well, they’d find ways to deal with these pitfalls and land mines, even if it meant plowing straight through them. Zach wasn’t planning to go on the wagon anytime soon.

  And why the hell not? he thought. He liked alcohol—usually—but it wasn’t vital to him like pot, wasn’t essential to his body chemistry. You’re not in New Orleans where drinking’s de rigueur, not anymore. Why not just forget about the stuff and make him happy?

  Because I don’t WANT to!!! his mind raged in the voice of a cranky three-year-old. I LIKE to get drunk sometimes, there’s nothing wrong with that, it doesn’t make me beat people or punch them or kill them! It just makes me …

  What?

  Well, get laid, for one.

  He knew it was true; he had almost always been drunk when he went cruising in the Quarter. It helped him gloss over all sorts of things, like the look on Eddy’s face when she saw him chatting up some pretty, empty-headed creature of the night, the fact that he would just as soon spit in Death’s eye as wear a rubber, the knowledge that he just didn’t give a good goddamn about much of anything beyond hacking and having orgasms and watching slasher movies and thumbing his nose at the world.

  Except that now he did. And it seemed as good a time to say so as any.

  But just then a vehicle swept around the corner of Kinsey’s street and came screeching toward them. A pickup or a four-wheel drive from the sound and size of it, though it was going too fast to tell. Its occupants hung out the windows, all hairy limbs and big bullish heads with John Deere and Red Man caps wedged down firmly over the brow ridge. “FUCKIN’ QUAAAAAARES,” they heard, and a fusillade of silver beer cans sailed out into the slipstream and came clattering around them in the hot, still night. The truck was already disappearing over the next hill.

  The boys had been drinking beer, Zach observed. A fine fascist-owned beer with a bouquet hinting at toxic waste and a crisp, golden, pisslike undertone …

  He smelled the warm stale beer leaking onto the asphalt, saw a submerged cigarette butt dissolving in one of the little puddles, and lost it. He pushed away from Trevor and sprawled headlong over the curb and vomited in Kinsey’s yard. It felt marvelous, like the release of some crushing pressure, like vile crimson poison flooding out of his system. He felt the palms of his hands connecting with the earth, felt energy flowing up into his arms and through his body in huge, slow, steady waves. He was plugged into the biggest damn battery of all.

  When he was able to raise his head, Zach saw Trevor staring at him like some interesting but faintly repulsive bug. Zach crawled away from his puddle of vomit and sat shakily on the curb. He took off his spattered glasses, wiped them on the tail of his shirt. Trevor sat down next to him.

  “Do you know how many times I saw my dad get sick from drinking?” Trevor asked.

  “A bunch, I guess.”

  “No. Just once. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened, though, if he’d had a few more shots before Momma came home that night. What if he’d made himself sick and passed out? What if Momma could tell somehow that he’d drugged us?”

  “It sounds like Bobby was pretty much unstoppable.”

  “Maybe.” Trevor shrugged. “But maybe one more shot would’ve knocked him out. Maybe Momma would have taken me and Didi away.”

  “I guess it’s possible.” More than anything, Zach wanted Trevor to put an arm around his shoulders, wanted to lean into Trevor’s solid comforting warmth. But he wasn’t sure if Trevor was mad at him. “I used to hope the same thing when my parents would go on a binge,” he said. “I’d think, Just a couple more drinks and they’ll pass out. They’ll shut up. They won’t hit me anymore. But once they got on a tear, they usually stayed on it for a while.”

  “And you caught the worst of it.”

  “Yeah, unless they had something better to do.”

  “Then how—” Trevor turned to Zach, spread his hands wide. The expression on his face was half disgust, half genuine bewilderment. “How can you drink now? You saw what it did to them—how can you do it too?”

  “Simple. It doesn’t do the same things to me that it did to them.”

  “But—”

  “But nothing. Remember what you said last night? The still doesn’t have a choice about making liquor; the choice is up to the person who drinks it? Drinking didn’t make my parents act like t
hat. They were like that. I’m not.”

  “So where does that leave my father?” Trevor’s voice was quiet, but deadly.

  “Well …” This was the all-important question, Zach sensed. If he answered it wrong, he could forget about drinking around Trevor—which meant he could forget about Trevor, because he wasn’t going to start letting someone else do his thinking for him. And if he answered it too wrong, he wondered if he might see his blood decorating Trevor’s knuckles again.

  “Maybe Bobby was trying to tamp down his anger,” he said. “Maybe he was trying to make himself pass out before your mom came home.”

  “You think so?”

  He wants to believe that. Is it cruel to encourage him? I don’t think so; hell, I’d want to believe it if I were him. It might even be true. “I wouldn’t be surprised,” said Zach. “You know he loved you—”

  “No I don’t. I know he loved them. He took them with him. He left me here.”

  “Bullshit!” Zach didn’t care about giving the right answer now; this line of reasoning made him too angry to worry about getting hit. “He wasted everything they ever could have done, could have been. The only life he had a right to take was his own. He robbed them.”

  “But if you love someone—”

  “Then you want them to be alive. What’s to love about a cold, dead body?” Zach caught himself before he went too far on that track. “Bobby fucked up your life pretty good, but at least he let you keep it. He must have loved you best. If you were dead, twenty years of drawings never could’ve existed, and I couldn’t be loving you, and you couldn’t even be wondering about all this—”

  “What?”

  “I said, you couldn’t even be wondering—”

  “No. The other part.”

  “I couldn’t be loving you,” Zach repeated softly. The words felt so strange in his mouth; they had slipped out before he had even known he was going to say them. But he didn’t want to take them back.

  “I love you too,” said Trevor. He leaned over and kissed Zach full on the mouth. Zach’s eyes widened and he tried to pull away, but Trevor held him tight. He felt Trevor’s tongue sliding over his lips, worrying at the corners, and finally he gave up and opened his mouth to Trevor. They had already exchanged most of their other bodily fluids; he supposed a little puke wouldn’t make much difference.

  At last Trevor relented and just held him. Zach felt his shakes beginning to recede, the raw burn of bile fading from his throat.

  “So you’re really on the run?” Trevor asked after a while.

  Zach nodded.

  “And you told Kinsey and Terry you were from New York?”

  “Well, I don’t think Kinsey believes me. But that’s what I told them, yeah.”

  “You want to talk about it?”

  “Could we get in the car first?”

  “Sure.” Trevor reached for the keys, and Zach surrendered them without argument. “We ought to get going anyway, before those rednecks decide to come back and kick our asses.”

  Zach laughed. “Hell, if they did, Kinsey could just come out brandishing his casserole and scare ’em off.”

  Trevor got a feel for the Mustang quickly. He had once had a brief job driving cars from place to place, reasons unspecified and questions not encouraged by the management. Most of them had been scary old junkers or boring Japanese crackerboxes, but this car was fun to drive. Its engine was loud but smooth, and its wheels chewed up the road like a vicious little wildcat worrying a black-snake.

  There was a sour taste in his mouth like fruit juice gone bad, the ghost of Zach’s recycled wine. To Trevor it wasn’t much different from having the flavor of Zach’s sweat or spit or come on his lips. If you loved someone, he thought, you should know their body inside and out. You should be willing to taste it, breathe it, wallow in it.

  He got off Kinsey’s road, found his way to the highway, then took a side road that wandered off into the country.

  “I like the way you drive,” said Zach.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Fast.”

  “Just talk to me.”

  “It has to do with computers,” Zach warned.

  “I figured as much,” Trevor said darkly.

  They drove for an hour or more around the outskirts of Missing Mile, past dark fields, deserted churches and railroad crossings, small neat houses lit warm against the night. They passed the occasional bright store or honky-tonk joint, swerved to miss the occasional wet splay of roadkill on the hot blacktop.

  Zach told his tale without interruption from Trevor, save for an occasional question. When he finished, Trevor’s brain was spinning with unfamiliar terminology, with arcane concepts he had never believed possible, but many of which Zach claimed he had already done.

  “You mean you could get information about anybody—and change it? Could you get information about me?”

  “Sure.”

  “How?”

  “Well, let’s see.” Zach ticked off possibilities on his fingers. “Do you have any credit cards?”

  “No.”

  “Ever had a phone in your name?”

  “No.”

  “How about a police record?”

  “Well … yeah.” Trevor shuddered at the memory. “I got picked up for vagrancy once in Georgia. Spent the night in jail.”

  “I could get that easy. Erase it, too. With your Social Security number I could probably get your school and social-services records. And your standing with the IRS, of course.”

  “I doubt the IRS has ever heard of me.”

  Zach laughed softly. “Don’t bet on it, boyfriend.”

  They took a roundabout route back to Violin Road. By the time Trevor parked the car behind the house, it felt very late. The clouds had blown over and the sky was a brilliant inverted bowl of stars. Zach saw the Big Dipper, the Little Dipper, and the faint soft skirl of the Milky Way, which pretty much exhausted his store of astronomical knowledge. But he stared up into the universe until he was dizzy with infinity, and he thought he could see the great bowl slowly revolving around them, order born of chaos, meaning born of void.

  They pushed their way through the vines and entered the dark living room. The house felt very calm and still. Even the doorway to the hall had gone neutral. It was as if some charge had been switched off, as if some current had been interrupted, though the lights still worked. They brushed their teeth in the kitchen sink, fitted the sheets from Potter’s Store onto the mattress in Trevor’s room, undressed and lay together in the restful dark, their heads touching on the single pillow, their hands loosely joined.

  “So I might bring ghosts into your life,” Trevor mused, “and you might bring feds into mine.”

  “I guess so.”

  Trevor thought about it. “I believe I’d take my chances with the ghosts if I were you.”

  “I was hoping you’d say that.”

  And I guess I’ll take my chances with the long arm of the law, Trevor thought as he rolled over and fitted himself into the curve of Zach’s body. Harboring a fugitive is bad enough—they probably have a special punishment if you fall in love with one. He found that the idea of committing a federal crime didn’t faze him much. The thought of being in love still seemed far stranger.

  Zach had broken all kinds of laws, he supposed, but Trevor had never had much regard for laws. Few of them made sense to him, and none of them worked worth a shit. He had managed to avoid breaking them very often simply because he didn’t have many bad habits, and most of the ones he did have happened to be legal. But if any suit-wearing, mirrorshaded zombie dared touch a hair on Zach’s head, or set foot inside the boundaries of Birdland …

  Trevor didn’t know what might happen then. But he thought there would be great damage and pain. After all, this house had tasted blood before, had tasted it again today.

  He thought it might be getting a taste for the stuff.

  Somewhere in the hazy zone between night and morning, Zach opened his eyes a crack
and squinted into the darkness. He had no real sense of the room around him, of where he was at all. He only knew that he was still mostly asleep and about half-drunk, that his head was throbbing and his bladder was painfully full.

  He pushed himself off the mattress and stumbled into the hall. At the end of it a soft light glowed like a beacon. All he had to do was make his way to that light and relieve himself; then he could fall back into bed and sleep until the headache was gone.

  Zach shuffled down the hall naked and barefooted, trailing a hand along the wall for balance, and entered the bathroom. One of the forty-watt bulbs in the ceiling fixture buzzed fitfully, giving off a dim, flickering light. He stepped up to the toilet bowl and urinated into the small pool of dark muddy-looking water. The sound of his pee hitting the stained porcelain seemed very loud in the silent house, and he hoped he wouldn’t wake Trevor.

  Trevor … asleep in the next room, in Birdland …

  Zach was suddenly wide awake and very conscious of where he was. His stream of urine dried up. As he let go of his dick he felt a single warm drop slide down his thigh. The ghost of cheap red wine still swirled in his brain, making him dizzy, making him aware of just how easy it would be to panic.

  But there was no need. All he had to do was turn, step away from the toilet, and—

  —and he knew he hadn’t shut the door behind him when he came in.

  Though he had been mostly asleep, he remembered groping past it, hearing the knob rattle against the wall. The hinges were caked with rust and could not have closed silently. But though Zach had heard nothing, the door was now shut tight.

  He swallowed, felt his throat click dryly.

  Well, you live in a haunted house, you’re going to have doors shutting themselves once in a while. But that doesn’t mean anything in here can hurt you. All you have to do is walk over and turn the knob and you’re out of here.

  (and don’t look at the tub)

  That last thought came unbidden. Zach threw himself at the door, clawed at the knob, It slipped through his fingers and he realized that his hands were slick with sweat. He wiped them on his bare chest and made himself try again. The knob would not turn, would not even rattle in its moorings. It was as if the workings of the lock had fused.